Her Father's Sword
by Kilerkki
Summary: Tenten was never supposed to be a ninja. But she's not going to let that stop her. [Oneshot]


Her Father's Sword

-

When I told link no miko I wanted to write Tenten, she asked for the first time that Tenten ever holds a weapon. This isn't quite the same—as usual, I tried for something deep, and maybe I failed—but I hope you like it.

-

_The minstrel boy to the war has gone,_

_In the ranks of death you'll find him._

_His father's sword he has girded on _

_And his wild harp slung behind him._

--"The Minstrel Boy," American Folksong

-

The lizard moves at last, in a dusty flash of green-gold across the hot surface of the rock. Tenten narrows her eyes, keen brown gaze shooting ahead of the lizard to the shadowy crack where she knows it lives, fingers curling around the pebble clenched in one hand. A few more centimeters—_Now! _

The pebble smacks the wall bare millimeters short of the scurrying lizard's tail; it leaps forward with a tremendous effort and gains the safety of the crack just in time. The stooping brown hawk breaks off its dive with a furious flapping of wings and screeches of outrage. Tenten sticks out her tongue. "Find your dinner somewhere else," she tells the hawk. "Unless you want _this _one in the beak." She bounces another pebble meaningfully on her palm.

It can't possibly understand her words, but the hawk flaps away anyway, evidently remembering the stone that hit just short of its outstretched talons. Tenten watches the crack for a moment more, but the lizard doesn't reappear. Ah, well. Probably she scared it as much as its narrow escape from the hawk had. It's safer inside the crack, anyway.

"You stay there, lizard-san," she orders in the toughest voice she can manage. "I'll take care of you." She thinks for a moment, then adds, "That enemy was only a chuunin, anyway. I'm a jounin of Konoha—nobody's gonna get past _me!_"

In the world of her mind, the flinty pebble in her hand is already transformed into a handful of shuriken, her flimsy silk blouse and trousers into the sturdy padded canvas vest and blue uniform pants of an elite shinobi. She creeps softly around the garden, ducking behind a low stone bench when it seems the six enemy shinobi might have sensed her presence, holding her breath as they corner her teammates and draw their kunai with expressions of evil glee. Can she possibly defeat them all?

Of course! No room for doubt, anyway, like it says on the old scroll she found in the attic that morning. _In the soul full of courage there is no room for doubt. _If you doubt, Tenten thinks, then you're probably dead.

She leaps out from behind the bench with a fearsome yell; there's a time for sneakiness but it isn't now, when that scarred ninja is about to slit her teammate's throat! The stones with which she'd filled her pockets become shuriken that fill the air with their deadly whirr, nailing two of the enemy to the cliff beneath which they'd trapped her teammates. The other four dodge the shuriken and run to meet her, but she draws the katana sheathed on her back and slices through the first two as easily as if they are mere sakura petals floating on the breeze. One of the remaining enemy throws a handful of kunai, but she deflects them in the air with her own barrage of shuriken and follows them with an attack that she invents on the spot, another rain of kunai that draws their attention and leaves them open to her blinding attack with the katana. In a moment only one of the enemies is left and she's advancing on him with a steely gleam in her eye when—

"_Tenten!_"

The katana drops from suddenly nerveless fingers, once more a straight dry stick. The remaining enemy ninja shiver and dissolve into an eddy of leaves blowing away from the tree in the center of the garden. Her rescued teammates fade away, mere phantoms on the breeze. And Tenten herself dwindles from a tall proud kunoichi bristling with weaponry and spattered with blood into a small wistful-eyed girl in a grubby pink blouse and trousers with torn knees.

Only the dog-tags jangling around her neck are real. And Tenten isn't quite quick enough in tucking them away beneath her blouse to escape her mother's eyes. Her mother breaks off the usual scolding (_"I've told you and told you, Tenten, you're not to play those games, you know how I feel about those things—_") and her voice catches in her throat. "Tenten. Where did you get those?"

Tenten has been staring at her toes, waiting resignedly for her punishment—an extra hour of sewing, perhaps, or an afternoon confined to her room. But the new note in her mother's voice catches her attention, and she looks up. The dog-tags ring cheerfully against each other with the new movement, and her mother whitens. She's standing in the doorway that leads back into the house, one hand on the doorframe, the other at her throat. Her skin is very pale and smooth against her dark kimono, and the elaborate arrangement of her hair and her subtle make-up make her look, Tenten always thinks, like an especially expensive doll of the kind you are _never _allowed to use for target practice. She wears a necklace of her own, the simple bead collar she's worn every day Tenten could remember, and now her hand tightens convulsively around the strands of blue and white beads, so hard that her knuckles turn white. Her face and lips are even paler.

"I found them in the attic," Tenten says hurriedly, pulling the chain off her head and holding it out so that her mother can see that the small metal plates are indeed dull and battered with age. "I didn't steal them. They were in that chest in the back, you never said I couldn't look in there—" She didn't even take any of the kunai, because she knew what her mother would say if she caught her with knives; and she didn't look beyond the first layer either, because the second layer was dark clothing folded with mothballs that made her sneeze. "I didn't mess anything up, honest!" Not even the _courage _scroll, which she rolled back up and stowed beneath her futon before going out into the garden to play.

But her mother doesn't look any happier at this information. Her lips thin to a tight line, and she snatches the dog-tags out of Tenten's hands with more suppressed violence than Tenten had ever imagined lay within her gentle, refined, elegant mother.

"You're not to play with _anything _in that chest," she says. "You're not to go up into the attic at all. Do you hear me, Tenten? _This_—" and she shakes the dog-tags in her hand until they ring together with tiny metal screams—"is not for you. I swore when your father died—"

Tenten catches her breath with an illumination so shattering that it makes all the questions her mother has always refused to answer fall into place. "Those were Tou-san's, weren't they?" she demands. "Those things in the chest, those were his too. Was he a ninja? You never told me he was a ninja!"

"He was a ninja and it killed him," her mother snaps. She catches Tenten's wrist in a grip so hard it hurts, and she shakes her daughter like she shook the dog-tags, her fingernails biting into Tenten's wrist. "Listen to me now! These silly dreams of yours, these games—"

"They're not silly!" Tenten protests, but her mother ignores her, her voice climbing in volume and pitch as she continues.

"They're _wrong, _do you hear me? A ninja's nothing more than a bloodstained killer, and he lives and dies in violence. That's not the life I want for you. That's _not _the life _you _want!"

"But I do!" Tenten argues. "I want to hear about Tou-san, you've never told me anything—was he—?"

Her mother slaps her across the face, and for a moment both of them are too shocked to breathe. Then Tenten's mother collapses to her knees and hugs her daughter to her breast, sobbing so hard that it seems her fragile frame will shake into pieces. "I'm sorry, Tenten-chan, so sorry—I just can't bear to lose you too, please understand…"

But Tenten's eyes are dry and thoughtful and fixed on the silvery dog-tags lying gleaming in the grass where her mother dropped them. If she squints she can just make out the name engraved on the tags…

She barely hears her mother sob, "Konoha no Sato took my husband already. I won't let it have my daughter as well!"

Her mind is already made up.

-

The chuunin manning the registration desk on the first day of classes at the Konoha Ninja Academy is more than a little surprised when the last mother leads her son away and a little girl steps up alone in her place. The girl's barely tall enough to see over the table, but her wide brown eyes are deadly serious, and she pulls the registration form towards her with as much gravity as an Uchiha. She tells him her name as if she expects him to recognize it, and adds, "I want to be a ninja."

He blinks, and glances around for her parents; but she was the last in line, and all the other children's parents are filing out of the room now with their sons and daughters in tow. No unattached adults linger by the walls watching with a fond smile as their daughter registers herself; no one but him seems to be taking any interest in this little girl at all. He glances back down in time to see her calmly help herself to his ink pad and brush and begin filling out the registration form for herself. "Here—wait a second!" he says, feeling ridiculous. "You can't—"

She doesn't look up from the paper, filling in the spaces for her name and address with careful precise strokes of the brush. "I read the rules," she says. "My dad was a ninja. He died on a mission, so the village will pay my fees." A tiny pink tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth as she completes the last symbol of her name, and she tilts her head for a moment in pride before moving onto the next box.

Well, that explains why there's no proud father watching from the sidelines, but the chuunin isn't about to let things stand at that. "Where's your mother?" he persists. "Shouldn't she be here? This is a very important decision, you know—"

"She thinks I'm at the civilian school," the little girl says calmly. "I told her I wanted to register by myself, 'cause I'm a big girl now, and she let me go. But I came here instead." She fills in her parents' names, taking extra care with the name of her father, and then she glances up at the chuunin. "I don't need permission," she explains. "I read that in the rules too. If one parent's a ninja, I don't need her to say I can come. She doesn't need to know."

The chuunin sits back, shoulders slumping. "But—shouldn't you tell her?" he asks feebly. "This is a big step for you—"

"I'll tell her when I graduate," the girl assures him, and pushes the completed form across the table to him. "Have a nice day!"

She skips off towards the door, a pair of battered old dog-tags jangling around her neck.

-

The night Iruka-sensei sends the class home with a note for their parents about kunai and shuriken practice starting the next day, Tenten hides the note in her blouse and waits until she can hear her mother's breathing steady into sleep in the next room before she slips out of bed. She climbs up into the attic and picks her way around old boxes and broken toys and dusty futons to the chest hidden in the back. It's locked, now, but she doubts her mother had the heart to empty it. She sets her candle on the floor and picks the lock with the tip of a hairpin plucked from one of her buns. The lid is solid wood and very heavy, but she eases it back almost without a sound.

The pouch of kunai are still on top, along with the holster of shuriken and the med kit and the rolls of bandages. The kunai and shuriken are still as sharp as the blades of the big cleavers in the butcher's shop, and Tenten hopes Iruka-sensei won't mind. He told the class to have their parents buy blunted sets at first, but maybe he'll understand when she tells him all she has are her father's.

She only meant to pull out the kunai and the shuriken and then creep softly back to bed, but this is the first chance she's had to look through the chest since that day months ago when she first found it. This time she holds her nose with one hand to stifle sneezes and lifts out the mothball-packed clothes with the other. Dark blue shirts with Konoha's red swirl on the shoulders, dark blue pants, a pair of battered sandals, more bandages, a jounin vest threadbare with age and use. A Konoha hitai'ate, metal plate tarnished and scratched, headband stained with old sweat. She tries on the vest. It's far too big for her, and its weight hangs from her shoulders and warms her back. She closes her eyes and imagines that it's her father's arms, holding her close, and she rubs her face against the stiff collar and imagines that she can still catch traces of his scent in the old canvas.

The clothes aren't the last layer, though. There's another pouch of shuriken and several loose kunai, and then there are half a dozen scrolls—jutsu scrolls, she recognizes, not proverb scrolls like the one still tucked under her pillow, its symbols drawn in a hand she now recognizes as her father's—and, at the very bottom, a sheathed katana.

She draws the katana out with steady hands. The corded hilt is darkened with sweat and age, and although the blade is in excellent condition it's still marked by the tiny nicks and scratches that tell of long and hard usage. She curls her hands around the hilt and tries to imagine her father wielding this blade to strike in defense of Konoha, of his new family, of his teammates, of everything that he loved.

She's not sure how long she sits there with the katana unsheathed across her knees and the jounin vest warming her back and shoulders, but when she hears a rooster crow several houses away she knows it's been far too long. She packs everything up as quickly and neatly as she can, locks the chest again, and shoves it back in the corner. She tumbles down the ladder with her arms full of kunai and shuriken and scrolls, and she collapses in bed and throws the covers over her head just in time. Her mother stirs in the next room, and Tenten tries to catch her breath and calm her racing heart.

She nearly falls asleep in tactics class that morning, but in shuriken practice she hits the target every time. Iruka-sensei praises her and most of the boys glower at her, and Tenten just smiles and twirls her father's kunai.

-

The day Tenten graduates from the Academy is the first day she doesn't stop at the baths to quickly wash and change out of her sturdy school clothes into the new silk jacket and pants her mother made her for her twelfth birthday. It's the first day she doesn't bump into one of the civilian school children on their way home and casually ask them what they learned today, and it's the first day she walks through Konoha with her shoulders thrown back and her shuriken holster strapped to her leg and her new shiny hitai'ate glinting from her forehead.

It's also the first day she's ever truly dreaded going home.

_You shouldn't be scared, _she scolds herself. _She's your mother, she loves you, and once she knows this is what you want more than anything…_

Well, a ninja has to face all sorts of terrifying enemies. One's own mother should be among the least of one's concerns.

But when she slides the door open and kicks her sandals off and steps into the house, every muscle as tense as coiled wire and her lower lip caught nervously between her teeth, her mother is already there.

She stands in the entryway, small and slim and still very beautiful in her black kimono and elegant hair, and she holds a sheathed katana in her hands.

Tenten recognizes it instantly.

"Kaa-san," she whispers, her throat dry as sand. "How…how long have you known?"

Her mother tries a smile. It's not a very good smile, because Tenten can still see the worry and the fear and the grief in her eyes as plainly as if they were written in solid black brushstrokes on a page, but it's a brave smile. "Your teacher at the Academy came to visit me after the first day," she says. "He wanted me to know what you were doing. He…he knew your father." Her smile quivers a little, and crystal gathers at the corners of her dark eyes.

Tenten can't breathe.

"Congratulations," her mother says, and holds out the katana.

Her father's katana.

Tenten takes it in one hand and throws the other arm around her mother's shoulders, and for the first and last time in too many years to count, she lets herself break down and sob into the hollow of her mother's throat.

Her mother, her fragile, gentle, elegant mother, holds her close and lets her cry.


End file.
